BOSH Lite (aka bosh-lite) is a Director VM that is configured to use Warden CPI, which emulates VMs with containers. It's typically installed locally with VirtualBox; however, it could also be installed onto any cloud BOSH supports. See usage details

Canary instances are first instances updated within an instance group. Any update error in a canary instance causes the deployment to stop. Since only canaries are affected before an update stops, problem jobs and packages are prevented from taking over all instances.

The BOSH Command Line Interface (CLI) is what you use to run BOSH commands. CLI v2 is a new major version of CLI. It also replaces bosh-init CLI to manage Director VM. It's the recommended way to interact with the Director. See usage details.

The cloud config is a YAML file that defines IaaS specific configuration used by the Director and all deployments. It allows to separate IaaS specific configuration into its own file and keep deployment manifests IaaS agnostic. See usage details.

A Cloud Provider Interface is an abstraction layer between the Director and an IaaS (cloud). CPIs have to implement a small number of methods to perform VM, disk and network operations. CPIs could be written in different languages.

An encapsulation of software and configuration that BOSH can deploy to the cloud. You can think of a deployment as the state of a collection of VMs: what software is on them, what resources they use, and how these are orchestrated. Even though BOSH creates the deployment using ephemeral resources, the deployment is stable in that BOSH re-creates VMs that fail and otherwise works to keep your software running. BOSH also manages persistent disks so that state (for example, database data files) can survive when VMs are re-created. Combination of a deployment manifest, stemcells, and releases is portable across different clouds with minimal changes to the deployment manifest. See What is a Deployment?.

The basic unit of work performed by the Director. You can get the status and logs for any task. You can monitor the task throughout its lifecycle, which progresses through states like queued, processing, done, and error.

An instance group is a collection of instances tasked to perform same jobs. Each instance group has an associated VM type, persistent disk type, a stemcell and a set of jobs. Instance groups are configured in the deployment manifest.

A job is part of a release. It contains startup, shutdown scripts, and configuration files that tell the Agent how to start, run and monitor software on a VM. Jobs can depend on packages for necessary software. See details.

A VM that acts as a single access point for the Director and deployed VMs. For resilience, there should be more than one jump box. Allowing access through jump boxes and disabling direct access to the other VMs is a common security measure.

A YAML file that includes multiple operations to be applied to a different YAML file. Several CLI commands such as create-env and interpolate allow to provide multiple operations files via --ops-file flag. See details.

A collection of configuration files, source code, jobs, packages and accompanying information needed to make a software component deployable by BOSH. A self-contained release should have no dependencies that need to be fetched from the internet. See What is a Release?.

A generic VM image that BOSH clones and configures during deployment. A stemcell is a template from which BOSH creates whatever VMs are needed for a wide variety of components and products. See What is a Stemcell?.

Variable points to a saved value in some store. Variables are typically used in configuration files (manifests) to decouple sensitive (passwords, certificates) or volatile (bucket name, number of instances) data from more static content (general configuration). Variables are denoted with double parens -- ((namespace/var-name)).

VM extension is a named Virtual Machine configuration in the cloud config that allows to specify arbitrary IaaS specific configuration such as associated security groups and load balancers. See usage details.